Season 3, Episodes 11-12: "Past Tense," or "Riots-A-Roni: The San Francisco Treat"
Star Trek really loves naming its time travel episodes after the rules of English grammar. We had "Future Imperfect" during Season 4 of TNG, and "Past Tense" in DS9. I'm looking forward to the episode titled "Subjunctive Mood," where the cast talk about the possibility of doing something in the future.
"Past Tense" is a pretty traditional Star Trek episode, even for DS9. Ever since Harlan Ellison's "City At the Edge of Forever" (Star Trek: TOS), time travel episodes have been a staple of the series. Often these episodes are among the best of the series. "Yesterday's Enterprise" may be TNG's very best episode, if "All Good Things" didn't exist--also a time travel episode. "Time's Arrow" had Data traveling back in time to a 19th century San Francisco to clash with a cantankerous Samuel Clemens; it wasn't brilliant, but it was good fun. "Tapestry," "Cause and Effect," the list goes on. Star Trek loves its time travel episodes, and "Past Tense" is one of the better ones.
Past Tense has more in common with the original City at the Edge of Forever than anything else. And I believe Tense is the better episode of the two. While "City" was a good piece of science fiction, ultimately it had little to do with Star Trek; "Past Tense" is a powerful exploration on causality, and the fragility of individual moments in history; but it's also an episode relevant to the Star Trek universe.
The mechanics of time travel aren't important here. Sisko, Bashir, and Jadzia end up in the good old 21st century after a transporter accident. 2024, to be exact. Four years from now, mass unemployment and income inequality has driven America into a state of enforced segregation; the ultra-rich live in luxury, while every undesirable in society--the jobless, the mentally ill, the poor, the violent, and the unfortunate--are sent off into Sanctuary Cities where they live and die in silence.
Sanctuary Cities are reminiscent of Venetian and German ghettos. They carry the emblems of apartheid and Japanese internment camps, ICE detention centers and post-apocalyptic ruins. They are places that have existed in our history, exist today, and may exist again in the future; what the Sanctuary Cities lack in verisimilitude, they make up for in accurate symbolism. It's 2019, and we talk about building walls and shoving illegal immigrants behind them. Out of sight, out of mind. Sanctuary cities are places for the unwanted elements of society to disappear and stop being a problem. They're quarantine zones, and the implication is that people without a job ("Gimmes"), people with mental health problems ("Dims") and people with a criminal record ("Ghosts") all constitute the same class of pariah; they're all part of the same melting pot of the unwanted and unwelcome.
This episode aired in 1995, thirty years away from 2024. The people writing this episode imagined a world thirty years in the future. Many of the same problems interrogated in this episode are problems we're struggling with today: poverty, class division, joblessness, homelessness, lack of adequate mental and physical health care. If this episode were written and produced in 2020, then we would be imagining the world in 2050. Would these ideas feel dated if they took place in 2050, rather than in our present day? Are they any less relevant?
Sisko and Bashir are trapped in a sanctuary city a few days before a historic riot. A violent uprising in Sanctuary City A ends with the deaths of hundreds of civilians, but out of the brutality and violence, public opinion begins to change. These riots--known as the Bell Riots--represent a watershed moment in American history. This is rock bottom for our country; after the Bell Riots, we finally begin addressing the problem of social and economic inequality, a trajectory which leads to Starfleet, the Enterprise, and the stars
The Bell Riots are named after Gabriel Bell: a good man in the right place at the right time. Bell was supposed to save the lives of several hostages and die in the process. His martyrdom becomes emblematic of the riot itself and helps change public opinion. While trapped in Sanctuary City A, Sisko and Bashir accidentally get into a fight that was never supposed to happen. Gabriel Bell dies in the scuffle, and Sisko takes up his name in an effort to repair history.
This is all fairly rote time travel fiction. Something disrupts the timeline. The heroes have to repair the timeline by replicating the arrow of causality, so that everything that was supposed to happen actually happens.
And to be honest, as a time-travel episode, this is okay. It doesn't do anything particularly new or exciting with the tropes of time travel. The Bell Riots happen. Sisko fills in for Bell. The momentary disruption of history repairs itself with Sisko acting as a temporal band-aid.
But where "Past Tense" stands out is in its raw and honest interrogation of contemporary society. This is a two-part episode that could easily have been edited down to a single, full-length episode. Instead, "Tense" spends scene after scene wallowing in the quagmire of its own setting. Half an episode's length goes by before Bashir and Sisko do anything. There are long, hard scenes consisting of nothing other than Bashir interviewing a social worker or Sisko arguing with a local guard. Very little actually happens in Past Tense.
And I like that. Past Tense is as much documentary as it is a piece of science fiction. It forces the audience to look at the problems of the 21st century in the eye. Bashir and Sisko spend the majority of the episode helpless to do anything but wait, and we're stuck right there with them, just hanging out in Sanctuary City A until the inevitable riots happen.
This isn't to say that I loved Past Tense. There's a lot about this episode that irritated or exhausted me. I hated everything about Biddle "B.C." Coleridge--a long-haired, fedora-wearing douchebag who comes across like a very bad impression of Jason Mewes. Everything BC said and did got under my skin. He's like Fox News's idea of an angry Millennial.
It's tempting to say that Past Tense is topical, or appropriate for 2019. It's more accurate to say that Past Tense is relevant, because it has always been relevant. We have always been fighting a slow, hard fight for human and civil rights. The Million Man March to DC was a demonstration for jobs and civil rights. The issues brought up by this episode were relevant in 1995, and they're relevant in 2020, and they're going to be relevant in 2050.
Change is slow and difficult to measure. I don't know if the world of 2024 will be better or worse than the one imagined by this episode. I don't know if the world of 2050 will be better or worse, whether we will have destroyed our environment or cured cancer, whether we'll be living in a dystopian-fascist society or in some kind of post-capitalistic golden age. For some viewers, "Past Tense" is an idealistic exercise in naivete, placing its faith in the rickety idea that sooner or later, we'll hit rock bottom and finally realize that things have to change. For other viewers, this episode is an inspiring reminder of the possibility of change--that all things must inevitably change, because nothing about us is permanent.
I'm in the latter camp. Nothing really last. Not the good days, but and not the bad ones either. I had problems with Past Tense. I'm not even sure I enjoyed it, or would watch it again. But for all its narrative flaws, this episode made me think seriously about the future. The best science fiction always does.
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